Criminializing the Children of Poverty

Today, schools have begun to impose insane dress codes, with Draconian punishments for those who do not conform. Any sense of individuality is being destroyed. Educators, who are incapable of teaching, of handling classrooms, are now regularly resorting to punishments that are designed to destroy a child, rather than guide them toward a decent education. They are abjectly incompetent, terrified of lawsuits, and have no business teaching, let alone being around children. One can only imagine what they would to if they were cast back in time and faced with grown children who attended school in their bare feet, had few clothes other than the ones on their back, had no deodorant, and poor grooming habits. They did though, receive a far superior education to what children are receiving today.

In Meridian, Mississippi, a girl who had a bladder disorder, had to rush from class, to avoid urinating on herself. She angered her teacher, who had her arrested and confined to a detention center. The child was black.

“…Nearly 900 arrests were made at New York City public schools during the 2011-2012 school year, and 90 percent involved black or Latino students, according to an analysis of NYPD data released last year. Another 1,666 summonses were issued for illegal conduct.

New York’s public school students are dragged out of classrooms and cafeterias by police officers for shouting in the hallways or scribbling on desks. Court summonses and assault charges are levied for playground fistfights, and students are carted from schools to precincts for the fear-inducing offense of carrying a cell phone on school grounds. In a number of cases, officers have also used excessive force to arrest children for violating school rules, at times leaving injuries requiring hospitalization.

That’s why the ACLU – along with the New York Civil Liberties Union, and law firm Dorsey & Whitney – is suing the City of New York on behalf of the city’s public middle and high school students, accusing the NYPD’s School Safety Division of violating students’ constitutional rights.

Yet the over-policing of our schools is not an issue unique to New York City.

The deployment of cops to public schools across the country epitomizes the national trend known as the “school-to-prison pipeline,” in which children of color are funneled from our public school classrooms into the juvenile and criminal justice systems.

There’s Kaleb Winston, the Salt Lake City 14-year-old who was interrogated by gang police at his school because of the design of his backpack and the sketches he made for art class. Or the Kansas sophomore whose arm was broken as a cop pulled a Taser gun to help arrest him for wearing saggy pants. One Wisconsin teen was arrested and fingerprinted for allegedly stealing a chicken nugget meal in the school cafeteria, while a Texas honor student was jailed for missing class. And then there’s the Georgia kindergartener who was handcuffed last year when she refused to calm down….”

Once upon a time, in England, they had a system that was cruel and vicious. A person could be hung for stealing a crust of bread. We decry the brutality of Islamic “justice” but the very same people who are terrified of Sharia being practiced here are the ones most guilty of forcing barbaric practices on minority children of poverty in this country.

In Mississippi a kindergartener came from a family where they were unable to afford the black shoes required by the dress code. His mother, instead of asking for a hand-out, colored his red shoes black with a magic marker. They were that poor. When the red started bleeding through, the child was picked up by cops – to teach his mother a lesson. Once upon a time, when I was in the third grade, my mother was quite ill. I was late for school. I was required to write, 1000 times, ‘I will not be late for school.’ My mother had explained how ill she was. When my father protested, the principal molested me, repeatedly. He also tried to kill me. I was locked in a cold, dark closed for an entire day, after he molested me. My mother nearly went insane trying to find me.

There is something horrific about demonizing a child, in school, an innocent child, because of something, an innocent something, that occurred at home. What happened to me has clouded and tainted my entire life. For the most part, I have recovered. I can even write these words without resorting to tears and hysteria. I will never ever forget. It has left me with a total and absolute contempt for the educational system, administrators, and educators in general. Aside from family members, more children are molested, raped, and harmed by teachers and educators than by any other group. These are the people the far right wants to be armed. You arm these people and they will destroy even more innocent lives.

This poor – literally – child, was humiliated. The entire system is now being used to humiliate children of poverty and minorities. They are destroying lives, giving children criminal records, and ruining families. There is something wrong when a student is sent to a juvenile detention center for wearing the wrong color socks.

“…The DOJ’s lawsuit, despite its bombshell revelations for the rest of the country, has been a long time coming. Groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the NAACP have been concerned about Meridian for years.

The SPLC’s inquiry into Meridian began in 2008, when attorneys started hearing reports of “horrific abuse” of youth housed in juvenile detention centers, said Jody Owens, managing attorney of the SPLC’s juvenile justice initiative in Mississippi. Advocates learned that 67 percent of youth in detention centers arrived there from the Meridian school system, Owens said. In between school and detention, students were denied access to counsel and due process, and many were never made aware of what they were even being arrested for. “The administrators were the judge, jury and executioner,” Owens said.

This practice has also appeared to target black students. Meridian, a city of 40,000 people, is 61 percent African-American. But over a five-year period, Owens said, “There was never once a white kid that was expelled or suspended for the same offense that kids of color were suspended for.”

Among the infractions that landed Green, who is black, in juvenile detention were talking back to a teacher, wearing long socks and coming to school without wearing a belt. He was behind bars for stretches of time as long as two weeks, and the real rub, his mother Gloria said, is that weekends didn’t count as days served. A 10-day suspension stretched to 14 actual days; time for Meridian juvenile justice officials apparently stopped on weekends. All that back and forth out of school and in juvenile took a real toll on Green’s education, and he was held back from the eighth grade.“

It was mind-boggling,” Gloria Green said. “My son loved school and to be kicked out as much as he was, one year he just couldn’t catch up.”

“We did everything we know to do. I went over to the school and got make-up work, and he still failed two subjects and at that point I didn’t know which way what my child was going to go.”

“We talk about the school to prison pipeline and it’s often an abstract thing,” said Shakti Belway, an attorney who worked closely with families on the Meridian case for the Southern Poverty Law Center. “But here it is literally happening over ridiculous, minor charges.” Indeed, children as young as elementary school students have been taken directly from school and forced to serve school suspensions inside a jail cell. In its complaint, the DOJ charged the city’s police department with operating a de facto “taxi service” shuttling students away from school and into youth jails….”

School security officers are the very individuals the NRA wants armed.

Jackson Free Press

It is quite obvious that the students in these stories are not wealthy and they are not white. Something terribly disturbing is going on in the increasingly Dickinsonian nation of ours. Not only is there something heartbreaking about the tale of a child, being taken home by cops, because his mother cannot afford a certain color of shoes, but it is disgusting. There was no compassion, no kindness, no basic human decency. Instead of sending the child home, to humiliate he and his mother, the decent thing would have been to quietly purchased a pair of shoes for the child.

There is an agenda that is becoming more and more apparent. It is all about creating a subclass of terrorized, poorly educated workers who are so ill informed and badly educated that they won’t even know they have rights, let alone that there is a minimum wage. With countries like China, where labor is still cheep, becoming more and more aware of human rights, and the limitations of slave labor, the only possible way to keep cheap goods flooding Walmart and other box stores is to turn the United States into a third world. This subclass won’t require a minimum wage. They won’t know one exists. They will have been so abused, so manipulated and destroyed that they will basically submit to anything.

“...Ayn Rand hated governments and democracy. She considered them systems of mob rule. She grew up in Russia, and as a child watched the Bolsheviks confiscate her father’s pharmacy during the Russian Revolution. Likely suffering from PTSD from that incident, Ayn Rand devoted her future writings to evil government, including the “evil” of its functions like taxation, regulation, and providing social services to the poor and sick.

She divided the world into makers and takers (or what she called “looters”).

On one side are the billionaires and the industrialists. People like Dagny Taggert, a railroad tycoon, and Hank Rearden, a steel magnate. Both were fictional characters in her book Atlas Shrugged, but both have real-world counterparts in the form of the Koch Brothers, the Waltons, and Sheldon Adelson. According to Rand, they are the “Atlases” holding up the world.

So, in Atlas Shrugged, when the billionaires, tired of paying taxes and complying with government regulation, go on strike, Ayn Rand writes that the American economy promptly collapsed.

On the other side are the “looters,” or everyone else who isn’t as rich or privileged, or who believed in a democratic government to provide basic services, empower labor unions, and regulate the economy. They are the leeches on society according to Rand (and according to Mitt Romney with his 47% comments). And, as she told Mike Wallace in in 1959, they do not even “deserve love.”

To our Founding Fathers, looking out for the general welfare of the population was an explicit role of the government, one of its most important and the reason this nation was created when we separated from Britian.

But to Ayn Rand, a government that taxed billionaires to help pay for healthcare and education for impoverished children was not just unwise economically, it was also immoral….”

The abuse of impoverished and minority students, because they are unable to conform to the draconian rules of society, is the first step in creating a massive underclass, of takers, just waiting to be used, broken, and thrown into the sewers to die.

This is NOT the United States I have known. Something nasty is happening here. If we don’t step up to stop it, it will engulf and destroy our country.

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SJ Reidhead (aka The Pink Flamingo) is a writer based in New Mexico. The author of two published novels, both westerns: Dust Devil and The Second Mrs. Earp and two published works of non-fictions: TRAVESTY: Frank Waters Earp Agenda Exposed and A Church for Helldorado, Endicott Peabody's 1882 Tombstone Diary. One of the leading authorities on the life of Wyatt Earp and Tombstone during the Earp years, she is currently writing a series of murder mysteries set in modern day Tombstone. The author is also working on a book about fashion in the Wild West. When complete, there will be over 2100 unpublished antique photographs dating from 1855-1910.

The author's work has appeared in Wild West, True West, Blogcritics, and The Tombstone Times. Recently the author has had to deal with a father who succumbed to Alzheimer's Disease. This is leading to a book dealing with the frustrations of dealing with the frustrations of the disease, finance, legal, health-care, and things no one bothers telling families about it. She is currently working on a murder mystery series set in modern day Tombstone and Cochise County. Several books of essays on Christian living are currently in edits. A book of essays and revisions of articles about Wyatt Earp has been completed and will include her latest work detailing her theory about the murder of his second wife, Mattie.

SJ Reidhead has been involved in Republican politics since she was 'a little kid'. During the Reagan years she was a lobbyist working with various non-profit organizations who were attempting to salvage NASA and the American space program after the disastrous Carter years. In spite of ups and downs, and numerous disappointments, politically, it is obvious the only political hope for this country is via the Republican Party. Along with politics she is an opera fanatic, has been known to stalk baritones to the point of being a baritone junkie, and loves baseball.

The Pink Flamingo went on line on October 4, 2005.

THE PINK FLAMINGO STORY

It started out as a joke. During the seven years I worked with the girls of my parish, leading a youth group, one of the things that I stressed were manners. Part of having manners, the way I see it, is to know how to set a proper table, host a party, cater it, and clean up afterward. I was fortunate enough to have a group of very talented girls in my youth group. They learned how to plan for, and execute large church functions, very properly. During one such function I noticed there were several incredibly tacky pink flamingos sitting on the table. Knowing the girls were up to something, I said nothing. A few months later they did the same thing at a function I was hosting at my home. I said nothing. They had a birthday party for me. More pink flamingos appeared - and a joke was born.

Thanks to the girls, all of whom are now grown, I have a collection of pink flamingos. It has become an ongoing joke. When I began working on my political blog, I realized the only possibly title was The Pink Flamingo!